Wait what…So in the end May was a productive month!

 

April 2020 was tough. I still didn’t have a job (I still don’t, but I think I am getting somewhere), tax season was on, and I just wasn’t able to get anything meaningful or productive out of my hands.

And it showed.

April was one of the least productive months. I ‘only’ published five pieces of content on my website page, I was interacting less on Social Media than I used to. Overall, I just wasn’t creating. I had a lot of days where I just woke up, ate, and went to bed again.

Life isn’t really that exciting if you don’t have any goals in mind.

So at the end of April I had promised myself May would be better. I had set four goals to improve:

1. I wanted to improve my website’s SEO, by optimizing 1 page per week and uploading 1 blog post per week
2. I wanted to be more creative and productive: I wanted to restart the habit of writing morning pages (if you want to know what that means, check this out)
3. I wanted to gather more content, by reading a few book pages per day and/or reading a few website articles per day.
4. I had set a goal of 2 to 3 Tweets per day, and 10 responses per day to be more active on more twitter.

I had told myself I should revisit these goals multiple times per week.

In the end, of course, I left this Excel sheet unnoticed until the beginning of June.

On June 6, I reopened the excel sheet and wondered: “Did I even meet any of the four goals I had set?”

Well, in some ways: Yes!

I think I have only optimized two or three pages for SEO in May, but I did upload 7 blogs!

I think I only wrote 4 Morning Pages in May. But there hasn’t been any day in May where I haven’t created anything. Yes, I’ve had some creative slumps but I’ve also had moments where I created a lot.

I’m still not reading each day, but I have bought a couple of new books and I’m currently really into reading ‘Deep Work’ by Cal Newport.

In terms of Tweets, May was one of my more productive months.

The progress I’ve made in May isn’t perfect at all. But I have certainly done things. Especially when I remind myself of all the other accomplishments I have made in May: The things I didn’t track as goals.

 

It is quite funny how I have unconsciously (partially) accomplished the goals I had set at the beginning of May. I am not sure how I did it, but it reminds me of the things James Clear and Robert Cialdini say in their books.

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear says that by writing down what you’re going to do when and where, you are more likely to perform a task. On the other hand, if you’re not writing anything down, you will likely forget the goals you have set.

 

And, as Cialdini tells in ‘Influence’, people unconsciously change their attitudes and behaviours after writing down a commitment on paper. In his book, Cialdini shows multiple examples of people staying commitment to things because they have promised to do so on paper.

Maybe I should write down my goals for June 2020.